The excellent Hatay Archaeology Museum supposedly has the second largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world. I don't know where the largest is, but the one in Hatay has quite enough for one day thank you. The museum had one guard with a pistol and one with a huge truncheon swinging from her belt; if you can think of anything harder to steal than a ten foot square mosaic then I'd like to hear of it but perhaps they have a problem with delinquent youths drawing moustaches on the Roman gods.
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| Not bad eh? |
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| Some of the mosaics have bits missing, so you have to complete them yourself. I'm pretty sure this is right. |
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| I'm not sure the museum guards have been doing their job |
We watched the Istanbul derby of Besiktas v Galatasaray in a bar, where the atmosphere was predictably raucous. The game had to be abandoned after hundreds of Besiktas fans stormed the pitch and hurled plastic chairs at tear-gas spraying riot police; nobody in the bar seemed to think it was anything out of the ordinary. In England they turn the camera away from such incidents, but in Turkey the commentator perks up and describes the incident with a practised eye - "nice back-handed baton use there" and so on.
Turkey is in fact a curiously violent place, as you will realise if you saw the photo last week of the Turkish MP with a bloody nose after some fairly robust political debating. Last week on my way to work we got stuck behind a road rage incident where the two drivers were out of their cars and squaring up to each other. Suddenly a man who I am certain had nothing to do with the incident rushed up with a knife drawn, at which point five other bystanders leapt on him. All rather jolly.
No weekend here is complete without an ascent of the town hill, which affords some good views and will be blogged about as soon as I run out of more interesting material.
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| Antakya from the hill. The alien spaceship that has landed top centre is Prime Mall, second swishest mall in Antakya. |
